The association of language style matching in text messages with mood and anxiety symptoms.

Context: Impairment in social functioning is a feature and consequence of depression and anxiety disorders. For example, in depression, anhedonia and negative feelings about the self may impact relationships; in anxiety, fear of negative evaluation may interfere with getting close to others. It is unknown whether social impairment associated with depression and anxiety symptoms is reflected in day-to-day language exchanges with others, such as through reduced language style matching (LSM).

Examining the Flourishing Impacts of Repeated Visits to a Virtual Art Museum and the Role of Immersion.

Visiting art museums has been associated with a range of flourishing outcomes. However, there have been recent shifts towards increasing digital engagement with art, leading to a radical change in how people experience visual art. Given the now expansive virtual art viewing options, it is important to understand whether digital engagement can also lead to greater flourishing, and, if so, under what conditions.

Mental Health, Social Connectedness, and Fear During the COVID-19 Pandemic: A Qualitative Perspective from Older Women with HIV.

Older women with HIV (WWH) confront significant biopsychosocial challenges that may be exacerbated by the COVID-19 pandemic. Between May 2020 and April 2021, following a resiliency intervention conducted as part of a randomized parent trial, 24 cisgender WWH (M = 58 years old) completed quantitative assessments and qualitative interviews exploring the impact of COVID-19 on mental health. Qualitative data were analyzed via rapid analysis.

COVID-related social determinants of substance use disorder among diverse U.S. racial ethnic groups.

Objective: Black, Asian, and Hispanic/Latino people are disproportionately impacted by the COVID-19 pandemic and were more likely to experience coronavirus-related racial discrimination. This study examined the association between pandemic-related stressors, including employment and housing disruptions, coronavirus-related victimization distress, and perceptions of pandemic-associated increase in societal racial biases, and substance use disorder (SUD) risk among Asian, Black, Hispanic/Latino, and non-Hispanic White adults in the U.S.

Prospective associations of text-message-based sentiment with symptoms of depression, generalized anxiety, and social anxiety.

Objective: Language patterns may elucidate mechanisms of mental health conditions. To inform underlying theory and risk models, we evaluated prospective associations between in vivo text messaging language and differential symptoms of depression, generalized anxiety, and social anxiety.

Methods: Over 16 weeks, we collected outgoing text messages from 335 adults.

Head versus heart: social media reveals differential language of loneliness from depression.

We study the language differentially associated with loneliness and depression using 3.4-million Facebook posts from 2986 individuals, and uncover the statistical associations of survey-based depression and loneliness with both dictionary-based (Linguistic Inquiry Word Count 2015) and open-vocabulary linguistic features (words, phrases, and topics). Loneliness and depression were found to have highly overlapping language profiles, including sickness, pain, and negative emotions as (cross-sectional) risk factors, and social relationships and activities as protective factors.

Resilience of primal world beliefs to the initial shock of the COVID-19 pandemic.

Introduction: People hold general beliefs about the world called primals (e.g., the world is Safe, Intentional), which are strongly linked to individual differences in personality, behavior, and mental health.

Linguistic predictors from Facebook postings of substance use disorder treatment retention versus discontinuation.

Early indicators of who will remain in - or leave - treatment for substance use disorder (SUD) can drive targeted interventions to support long-term recovery. To conduct a comprehensive study of linguistic markers of SUD treatment outcomes, the current study integrated features produced by machine learning models known to have social-psychology relevance. We extracted and analyzed linguistic features from participants' Facebook posts ( = 206, 39.

Modeling Latent Dimensions of Human Beliefs.

How we perceive our surrounding world impacts how we live in and react to it. In this study, we propose LaBel (Latent Beliefs Model), an alternative to topic modeling that uncovers latent semantic dimensions from transformer-based embeddings and enables their representation as generated phrases rather than word lists. We use LaBel to explore the major beliefs that humans have about the world and other prevalent domains, such as education or parenting.

Using Facebook language to predict and describe excessive alcohol use.

Background: Assessing risk for excessive alcohol use is important for applications ranging from recruitment into research studies to targeted public health messaging. Social media language provides an ecologically embedded source of information for assessing individuals who may be at risk for harmful drinking.

Methods: Using data collected on 3664 respondents from the general population, we examine how accurately language used on social media classifies individuals as at-risk for alcohol problems based on Alcohol Use Disorder Identification Test-Consumption score benchmarks.

Women's Substance Use and Mental Health During the COVID-19 Pandemic.

Purpose: Women are experiencing greater unemployment and increased stress from childcare responsibilities than men during the COVID-19 pandemic. Women with these experiences may be at particular risk for mental illness and increased substance use during the COVID-19 pandemic. The purpose of the study was to assess women's substance use, mental health, and experiences of COVID-19 pandemic impacts.

Experiential learning of cultural norms: The role of implicit and explicit aptitudes.

How should I greet her? Should I do what he requests? Newcomers to a culture learn its interpersonal norms at varying rates, largely through trial-and-error experience. Given that the culturally correct response often depends on conditions that are subtle and complex, we propose that newcomers' rate of acculturation depends on not only their explicit aptitude (e.g.

COVID-Related Victimization, Racial Bias and Employment and Housing Disruption Increase Mental Health Risk Among U.S. Asian, Black and Latinx Adults.

The mental health of racial/ethnic minorities in the U.S. has been disproportionately impacted by the COVID-19 pandemic.

The emotional and mental health impact of the murder of George Floyd on the US population.

On May 25, 2020, George Floyd, an unarmed Black American male, was killed by a White police officer. Footage of the murder was widely shared. We examined the psychological impact of Floyd's death using two population surveys that collected data before and after his death; one from Gallup (117,568 responses from = 47,355) and one from the US Census (409,652 responses from = 319,471).

Aesthetic Preference for Glossy Materials: An Attempted Replication and Extension.

The psychology of art and aesthetics has a long-standing interest in how low-level features, such as symmetry, curvature, and color, affect people's aesthetic experience. Recent research in this tradition suggests that people find glossy, shiny objects and materials more attractive than flat, matte ones. The present experiment sought to replicate and extend research on the attractiveness of images printed on glossy and flat paper.

Studying social media language changes associated with pregnancy status, trimester, and parity from medical records.

We sought to evaluate whether there was variability in language used on social media across different time points of pregnancy (before, during, and after pregnancy, as well as by trimester and parity). Consenting patients shared access to their individual Facebook posts and electronic medical records. Random forest models trained on Facebook posts could differentiate first trimester of pregnancy from 3 months before pregnancy (F1 score = .

Testing If Primal World Beliefs Reflect Experiences-Or at Least Some Experiences Identified .

Do negative primal world beliefs reflect experiences such as trauma, crime, or low socio-economic status? Clifton and colleagues recently suggested that primals-defined as beliefs about the general character of the world as a whole, such as the belief that the world is safe (vs. dangerous) and abundant (vs. barren)-may shape many of the most-studied variables in psychology.

Digital recovery networks: Characterizing user participation, engagement, and outcomes of a novel recovery social network smartphone application.

Background: Recovery support services, including in vivo (i.e., face to face) peer-based supports and social networks, are associated with positive effects on substance use disorder recovery outcomes.

Studying expressions of loneliness in individuals using twitter: an observational study.

Objectives: Loneliness is a major public health problem and an estimated 17% of adults aged 18-70 in the USA reported being lonely. We sought to characterise the (online) lives of people who mention the words 'lonely' or 'alone' in their Twitter timeline and correlate their posts with predictors of mental health.

Setting And Design: From approximately 400 million tweets collected from Twitter in Pennsylvania, USA, between 2012 and 2016, we identified users whose Twitter posts contained the words 'lonely' or 'alone' and compared them to a control group matched by age, gender and period of posting.

Evaluating the predictability of medical conditions from social media posts.

We studied whether medical conditions across 21 broad categories were predictable from social media content across approximately 20 million words written by 999 consenting patients. Facebook language significantly improved upon the prediction accuracy of demographic variables for 18 of the 21 disease categories; it was particularly effective at predicting diabetes and mental health conditions including anxiety, depression and psychoses. Social media data are a quantifiable link into the otherwise elusive daily lives of patients, providing an avenue for study and assessment of behavioral and environmental disease risk factors.

The language of character strengths: Predicting morally valued traits on social media.

Objective: Social media is increasingly being used to study psychological constructs. This study is the first to use Twitter language to investigate the 24 Values in Action Inventory of Character Strengths, which have been shown to predict important life domains such as well-being.

Method: We use both a top-down closed-vocabulary (Linguistic Inquiry and Word Count) and a data-driven open-vocabulary (Differential Language Analysis) approach to analyze 3,937,768 tweets from 4,423 participants (64.

The Light vs. Dark Triad of Personality: Contrasting Two Very Different Profiles of Human Nature.

While there is a growing literature on "dark traits" (i.e., socially aversive traits), there has been a lack of integration with the burgeoning research literature on positive traits and fulfilling and growth-oriented outcomes in life.

Association Between Predeployment Optimism and Onset of Postdeployment Pain in US Army Soldiers.

Importance: Pain after deployment is a major health care concern. While risk factors have been previously studied, few studies have explored protective factors.

Objective: To examine the prospective association between predeployment optimism and the onset of new pain after deployment in US Army soldiers.

Positive Psychology: A Personal History.

As president of the American Psychological Association in 1998, I organized researchers and practitioners to work on building well-being, not just on the traditional task of reducing ill-being. Substantial research then found that well-being causes many external benefits, including better physical and mental health. Among the applications of Positive Psychology are national psychological accounts of well-being, Positive Psychotherapy, the classification of strengths and virtues, Comprehensive Soldier Fitness, and Positive Education.